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Author Spotlight: Investigating the Impact of Emotional Prosodies on Voice Recognition and Perception
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Neural Systems Involved When Attending to a Speaker.

Salwa Kamourieh1, Rodrigo M Braga1, Robert Leech1

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Attentive listening relies on brain regions like the right anterior insula. Brain activity patterns differ based on task demands and the presence of background speech, impacting memory encoding.

Keywords:
attentioncognitive controlfunctional mRIright anterior insulaspeech

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Auditory Neuroscience

Background:

  • Auditory attention is crucial for memory encoding, with different demands in conversations versus lectures.
  • Background speech interference increases the need for auditory vigilance.
  • Understanding the neural basis of selective auditory attention is key to explaining listening impairments.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying attentive listening under varying conditions of speech segregation and task demand.
  • To identify brain regions involved in segregating attended speech from distractors.
  • To explore how task demands (immediate vs. delayed recall) and competing speech influence neural activity.

Main Methods:

  • Two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies were conducted.
  • Participants listened to attended speech amidst varying levels of background speech interference.
  • Task demands were manipulated by requiring immediate or delayed recall of attended speech content.

Main Results:

  • Commonly activated regions for speech segregation included the right anterior insula/frontal operculum (aI/FOp), left planum temporale, and precuneus.
  • A ventral right frontoparietal system showed activity modulated by both task demand and competing speech.
  • Domain-general frontoparietal systems exhibited increased activity during attentive listening, with less modulation by speech segregation.

Conclusions:

  • Neural activity in specific brain regions supports the segregation of attended speech from distractors.
  • Task demands and competing speech interact to modulate activity in frontoparietal networks.
  • These findings predict how attentive listening impairments may manifest in various communicative contexts following brain injury.